Saturday, 11 May 2024 Prague, panoramic tour, the Charles Bridge, the castle, folkloric dinner

Written 10 June 2024

As of today, we're officially on cruise time (as opposed to precruise-extension time), so we'll finally meet some of our fellow passengers. Up to now, the tour groups have been mixed, assembled from the several Viking itineraries that happen to intersect in Prague.

pate breakfast A wonderful addition to the breakfast buffet was this "Brussels pâté with cranberry." It actually apeared the day before, but I didn't get a good photo of it or find out what it was. I was surprised at the prevalence of cranberries in Czech cooking, since I think of them as an American thing, but it turns out there is a European cranberry, a congener of ours. I don't know whether it's less tart than the American cranberry or whether Europeans are just used to sweetening it more, but it tends to be sweetened like jam rather than like a relish for meat as it is in the U.S. Anyway I was afraid that thick layer of jelly on top of the pâté would dominate the flavor, but it didn't—it was mild and neither too sweet nor too acid: delicious. The pâté is based on pork liver and is smooth and spreadable (except for the bits of cranberry embedded in it)—terrific on bread or toast!

At the right, you can see a slab of it on my breakfast plate, along with the scrambled eggs, sausage and pain au chocolat. Its crown of jelly has fallen off and is lying beside it.

Note the little cardboard disk idicating that the table is occupied. When you left, you turned it back to its green "this table is available" side so that the waiters knew to clear it and the next diner knew he could claim it by turning the disk back over.

restaurant restaurant At 8:30 am, we caught the bus (a genuine Viking bus this time, rather than a local hire) for our four-hour "panoramic" tour of Prague. "Panoramic" usually means mostly a bus ride, but we'd been warned that much of the old city is not bus-accessible and we might therefore be doing more of it on foot. Our guide was Renata (named, she said, after Renata Tibaldi); the driver was Olek.

The bus drove us from the hotel along the river to a spot where it parked to let us off for the walking portion. From there I was able to deploy the telephoto. At the left here is a little art nouveau château with a cupola, near the top of the ridge on the far bank, that used to be a private residence but is now a restaurant. At the right (below and to the left of the building in the first photo) is another building repurposed as a restaurant; I forget what Renata said it was before.

 

boat Eiffel Farther to the left, right in front of us, was this glass-topped tour boat (its stern just visible in the previous photo). On the bank beyond it are (a) a long building on the river bank with three green domes, which is the seat of the Czech government (the prime minister has an office there); (b) above and behind its left-hand end, the red-roofed Prague Castle; and (c) sticking up out of the middle of the castle, the pointed black spires of St. Vitus cathedral. We'd be up there later.

And out of that shot to the left, the right-hand photo, much telephotoed, of a miniature Eiffel tower, apparently built with the approval of Eiffel himself.

cemetery cemetery From the river, we walked inland, into Josefov, the old Jewish quarter. On the way, Renata gave us more information on Prague and the Czech Republic. It's main industry now is tourism (or maybe that's just Prague). The population is 1.3 million, and more cars than people are registered. Wednesday (three days ago) was Liberation Day; Prague was the last city liberated at the end of WWII. Prague's river is the Vitava (called the Moldau in German). Czech is a slavic language. The old town of Prague was founded in 1230. It consists of 22 districts; the lower the number, the older the district. Finally, she said, on Saturday morning, 90% of locals go to the country, so it's quiet in town‐the crowds of people we see are all tourists.

The Jewish quarter was founded in 1200, but 100 years later, persecution and pogroms started (it was the age of the crusades) and it soon became a ghetto, where Jews were required to live and were subject to restrictions on their ability to leave it. The ghetto persisted until the 18th century, when it was abolished by Joseph II of Austria (Prague was then part of the Austro-Hungarian empire). At it's height, the Prague ghetto was the third largest Jewish population in Europe.

Within just a few blocks, we came to the old Jewish cemetery. At the left is the inscription on the gate; at the right is a shot through the bars, to show more of what's inside. Over the course of 350 years, 100,000 people were buried there, in layers. That's why the cemetery is so far above street level—when they ran out of space, layers of graves were added on top of existing ones. We'll get a more thorough tour on Sunday morning.

Through the middle of the old Jewish quarter runs Pařížská ulice, "Paris Street," now the premier upscale shopping street of the city. All the big international retailers have shops there—Hermes, Gucci, Dior, Prada, Jimmy Choo, Cartier, Louis Vuitton, Pinko, Longchamp, Furla, Celine, Moncler, Burberry, Bottega Veneta, and Valentino. It annoyed Renata that not one of them is Czech owned or based.

synagogue Jewish center At the left here is the Old New Synagogue, which Renata said is the oldest still-active synagogue in Europe.

At the right, just across the street, is the Jewish community center, "Jewish Town Hall." High on its tower are "conventional clock faces with Roman numerals. Below, on the side facing the synagogue, is a clock with Hebrew numerals; it runs counterclockwise, of course.

Prague was occupied for seven years during WWII. Before the war, the Jewish community counted 36,000 members; now, even after years of recovery, it's only about 12,000.

 

 

 

 

Hus town hall Beyond the Jewish quarter, we came to the main town square. Swifts were screaming overhead as we strolled around it. The large statue at the left here is of Jan Hus (aka John Huss) and a bunch of his followers. He was burned at the stake in 1415 for heresy (i.e., advocating church reform), 68 years before Martin Luther was even born, and is sometimes considered the first church reformer. The majority Czech religion is still Hussite Protestant. The symbol of the Hussite church is a chalice.

At the right is the old town hall, dating from 1300. There used to be more of it, but the wing to the right was destroyed by the Nazis and has been replaced by trees, the first couple of which you can see at the lower right corner. It's the only medieval tower in town with an elevator. (Apparently, the tower we had dinner in two nights ago is not medieval.)

 

 

 

St. Nick Our Lady Also on the square are the baroque St. Nicholas church (protestant), right where Paris Street hits the old reaches the square, and the (catholic) Church of Our Lady before Týn (dating from the 14th century) with two stone towers. Tycho Brahe (among others) is buried there.

The tall yellowish house just to the left of Our Lady is the House of the Stone Bell, the oldest house in town, and the two buildings in front of Our Lady are the church school.

 

 

 

 

 

clock zodiac On the side of the town hall (the one opposite the trees) is the city's famous astronomical clock. It was installed in in 1410, so it's the third oldest in the world and the oldest still working (though it hasn't worked continuously— it's had to be repaired several times). Besides the time, it tells the phase of the moon and a bunch of other astronomical details.

The lower dial (at the right here) shows the signs of the zodiac. In the outer ring of medalions are images showing what the people should be doing during each one—plowing, planting, harvesting, slaughtering, etc.

 

 

 

scratch art lion Nearby was this building decorated with white figures on a black background. It's 500 years old, dating from the Renaissance. Renata explained that a thin layer of black plaster was spread over the white wall, and an artist engraved the figures on the surface by scratching away the black to reveal the white underneath. She gave the process a name, which I didn't catch and haven't been able to find. In modern English this process is apparently just called "scratch art." We all did it with crayons in the first grade, and you can now buy specially prepared black "scratch boards" for the purpose.

Right next to the clock was this doorway over which are carved many whimsical figures but that Renata pointed out as featuring the symbol of the Czech nation—the lion with two tails.

She pointed out a nearby orange building that is now part of city hall and is where you buy tickets to take the elevator to the top of the tower, in case we wanted to come back later to do that. And overlooking us as we studied the clock was a set of upstairs windows (above a Swarovski shop) each painted with "NC State." Members of our group all saw them and talked themselves into the idea that they were some sort of Czech government thing—I forget what they decided the "NC" stood for—but I looked it up later, and yes, that building is the headquarters of the Prague program of North Carolina State University. As a native of Chapel Hill, I cannot add "Go, Wolfpack."

facades well Many of the streets radiating from the square were lined with old buildings painted in many colors (left-hand photo), and we followed one of them a short distance to a secondary square, in the center of which stood a hundred-year-old well enclosed in an iron cage (right-hand photo).

I don't know the story of the elaborately painted house you can see behind the well except that it was done in the 19th century for the owner, V.J. Rott, whose name appears in big red letters on the front. Several houses in the square retain the symbols over their doors that served as street addresses before house numbers came in with Napoleon—the fleur de lis, gold crown, blue horse.

Next, we walked back to the river, by a different route. As we went, Renata supplied ever more info abouy the Czech Republic.